Work Comp. and Personal Injury Claimants: Be Smart About What You Post on Facebook

I ran across an interesting story by a Pennsylvania personal injury attorney who warns that insurance companies are now apparently “friending” claimants on Facebook. He notes that his client received a friend request from her Progressive claims adjuster on Facebook. The client smartly declined the friend request.

I have yet to hear about this happening with any of my clients, but I don’t doubt that it will start to happen at some point. People often forget that Facebook and other social media sites are not necessarily private, regardless of your privacy settings.

Everyone uses Facebook, right? Meuser & Associate even has a Facebook page. The problem is that things you post on your Facebook page aren’t necessarily private. A single Google search will often bring up your personal Facebook page. If you have your page set to the highest privacy status, searchers can still usually see at least limited information about your profile. Another problem is that if your Facebook friends don’t have the highest privacy status, a searcher may be able to see things you’ve posted through your friends’ pages.

I’ve started to counsel my workers’ compensation and personal injury clients to use common sense about what they post on Facebook. For example:

• Select the highest privacy settings on your Facebook page.
• Don’t approve friend requests of people you don’t know.
• If you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see the picture, don’t post it.
• You are alerted when friends “tag” you in a photograph. Be smart about which photos you permit to be “tagged” with your name.
• Assume all comments you make on other Facebook pages are open to public viewing and can be attributed to you.

If you have a workers’ compensation injury or a personal injury case, assume that the workers’ compensation insurance adjuster or personal injury adjuster is searching for you on the internet. If you post a photograph of yourself playing softball when you’re supposedly completely disabled, or post pictures of yourself partying it up at a bar when you are off work due to an injury, and the insurance company gets their hands on it, I assure you it won’t help your case.

For a free, no-obligation consultation with one of our Minnesota workers’ compensation and personal injury attorneys, call us at 877-746-5680, or click here to send us an email.